Ronald Reagan defends naval presence in Persian Gulf, May 22, 1987

On this day in 1987, President Ronald Reagan defended the U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf at a memorial service held at the Mayport Naval Station in Jacksonville, Florida, for the sailors killed on May 17, when an Iraqi Mirage jet fired two Exocet missiles at the frigate USS Stark. In all, 37 naval personnel were killed and 21 were wounded in the attack.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said that the pilot mistook the Stark for an Iranian tanker. A naval court of inquiry, rejecting Iraqi claims, found that the Stark had been two miles outside an exclusionary zone enforced by the Iraqis during their war with Iran. During that eight-year conflict, which cost 1 million lives, the United States backed Iraq. The relationship soured after Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Earlier, on May 19, while visiting the University of Texas in Austin, Reagan had told reporters: “I’ve had a very fulsome apology from the president of Iraq. The whole thing — the course of the plane coming down that coast was the course that’s taken by Iraqi planes all the time, and we’ve never considered them hostile at all. They’ve never been in any way hostile.

“And this was at night, of course, so never had any visual sight of the target. They fired by radar, that missile. And this is why we’re waiting for further investigation and to find out what the attitude was on the vessel. We can understand — first of all, an AWACS plane of ours over Saudi Arabia had reported it as an Iraqi plane. And we didn’t have any reason to ever suspect hostility from them, and we won’t know until investigation is concluded whether this was an error of identification on the part of the pilot — that, I’m sure, we’ll hopefully find out from the Iraqis.”